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As a result of the Industrial Revolution, this situation lowly changed. Machines replaced hand tools. New sources of power, such as steam, replaced human and animal power. While most Americans continued to farm for a living, the economy began a gradual shift toward manufacturing. New Tech oenology The Industrial Revolution started in Britain in the mid-1 7005. British inventors developed new machines that transformed the textile industry. Since the Middle Ages, workers had used spinning wheels to make thread. A spinning wheel, however, could spin only one thread at a time.
In 1764, James Harvests developed the spinning jenny, a machine that could spin several warheads at once. Other inventions sped up the process of weaving thread into cloth. In the sass, Edmund Cartridge built a loom powered beater. It allowed a worker to produce a great deal more cloth in a day than was possible before. The Factory System New inventions led to a new system of producing goods. Before the Industrial Revolution, most spinning and weaving took place in the home. Rage machines however, had to be housed in large mills near rivers.
Water flowing downstream or over a waterfall turned a wheel that produced the power to run the machines. To set up and operate a spinning mill required Rage amounts of capital, or money. Capitalists supplied this money. A capitalist is a person who invests in a business in order to make a profit. Capitalists built factories and hired workers to run the machines. The new factory system brought workers and machinery together in one place to produce goods. Factory workers earned daily or weekly wages. They had to work a set number of hours each day.
A Revolution Crosses the Atlantic: Britain wanted to keep its new technology secret It did not want rival nations to copy the new machines. Therefore, the British Parliament passed a awe forbidding anyone to take plans of the new machinery Out Of the country. Slater Breaks the Law Samuel Slater soon proved that this law could not be enforced. Slater was a skilled mechanic in a British textile mill. When he heard that Americans were offering large rewards for plans of British factories, he decided to leave Britain in 1789. Slater boarded a ship bound for New York City.
He knew that British officials searched the baggage of passengers sailing to the United States. To avoid getting caught, he memorized the design of the machines in the mill. The First American Mill Slater soon visited Moses Brown, a Quaker capitalist who had a mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. The mill was not doing well because its machinery constantly broke down. Slater set to work on improving the machinery. By 1793, in Pawtucket, he built what became the first successful textile mill in the United States that was powered by water.
Slather’s wife, Hannah Slater, contributed to the success of the mill. She discovered how to make thread stronger so that it would not snap on the spindles. Slather’s factory was a huge success. Before long, other American manufacturers began using his ideas. Interchangeable Parts American manufacturers benefited from the pioneering work of American inventor Eli Whitney. Earlier, skilled workers made goods by hand. For example, gunsmiths spent days making the barrel, stock, and trigger for a single musket. Because the parts were handmade, each musket differed a bit from every other musket.
If a part broke, a gunsmith had to make a new part to fit that particular gun. Whitney wanted to speed up the making of guns by having machines manufacture each part. All machine-made parts would be alike-for example, one trigger would be identical to another. Interchangeable parts would save time and money. Because the government bought many guns, Whitney went to Washington, D. C. , to try to sell his idea. At first, officials laughed at his plan. Carefully, Whitney sorted parts for 10 muskets into separate piles. He then asked an official to choose one part from each pile.
In minutes, the first musket was assembled. Whitney repeated the process until 10 muskets were complete. The idea of interchangeable parts spread rapidly. Inventors designed machines to produce interchangeable parts for clocks, locks, and many other goods. With such machines, small workshops grew into factories. Lowell, Massachusetts: A Model Factory Town The War of 1 812 provided a boost to American industries. The British blockade cut Americans Off from their supply Of foreign goods. As a result, they had to produce more goods themselves.
The Lowell Mills During the war, Francis Cabot Lowell, a Boston merchant, found a way to improve on British textile mills. In Britain, one factory spun thread and a second factory wove it into cloth. Why not, Lowell wondered, combine spinning and weaving under one roof? The new mill that he built in Waltham, Massachusetts, had all the machines needed to turn raw cotton into finished cloth. After Loser’s death, his partners took on an even bigger project. They built an entire factory town and named it after him. In 1821 , Lowell, Massachusetts, was a village of five farm families.
By 1 836, it boasted more than 1 0,000 people. Visitors to Lowell described it as a model community composed of “small wooden houses, painted white, with green blinds, very neat, very snug [and] very nicely carpeted. ” Work in the textile mills in the early sass was hard. Workers faced long hours on their feet amid the noisy canines. Yet, the mills were generally clean and orderly. “Lowell Girls” To work in their new mills, the company hired young women from nearby farms. The Lowell girls, as they came to be called, usually worked for a few years in the mills before returning home to marry.
Most sent their wages home to their families. At first, parents hesitated to let their daughters work in the mills. To reassure parents, the company built boardinghouses. The company also made rules to protect the young women. Although factory work was often tedious and hard, many women valued the economic redeem they got from working in the mills. One worker wrote her sister Sarah back on a farm in New Hampshire: “Since I have wrote you, another pay day has come around. I earned 14 dollars and a half. . Like it well as ever and Sarah don’t I feel independent of everyone! Daily Life During the Industrial Revolution In Lowell and elsewhere, mill owners hired mostly women and children. They did this because they could pay women and children half of what they would have had to pay men. Child Labor Boys and girls as young as seven worked in factories. Small children were specially useful in textile mills because they could squeeze around the large machines to change spindles. Today, most Americans look upon child labor as cruel. Yet in the 18005, farm children also worked hard. Most people did not see much difference between children working in a factory or on a farm.
Often, a child’s wages were needed to help support the family. Long Hours Working hours in the mills were long – 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. True, farmers also put in long hours. However, farmers worked shorter hours in winter. Mill workers, in contrast, worked nearly the same hours all year round. In the early 1 Boob’s, conditions in American mills were generally much better than in most factories in Europe. As industries grew, however, competition increased and employers took less interest in the welfare of their workers. Later on you will read how working conditions grew worse.
Changes in Home Life The Industrial Revolution had a great impact on home life. As the factory system spread, more family members left the home to earn a living. These changes affected ideas about the role of women. In poorer families, women often had to go out to work. In wealthier families, husbands supported the Emily while wives stayed at home. For many husbands, having a wife who stayed at home became a sign of success. Growing Cities In 1800, the vast majority of Americans lived in rural areas. During the Industrial Revolution, many people left farms to work in factories.
Older chi expanded rapidly, while new cities sprang up around factories. This movement of the population from farms to cities is called arbitration. Arbitration was a steady but gradual process. In 1 800, only 6 percent of nation’s population lived in urban areas. By 1850, the number had risen TTT percent. Not until 1 920 did more Americans live in cities than on farms. Today’s standards, these early cities were small. A person could walk from end of any American city to the other in as little as 30 minutes. Buildings v only a few stories tall.
As the factory system spread, the nation’s cities Greg Hazards Growing cities had many problems. Dirt and gravel streets turned into holes when it rained. Cities had no sewers, and people threw garbage into streets. A visitor to New York reported that “The streets are filthy, and the stranger is not a little surprised to meet the hogs walking about in them, f he purpose of devouring the vegetables and trash thrown into the gutter Under these conditions, disease spread easily. Epidemics of influenza and cholera raged through cities, killing hundreds.